The Iona Institute ~ for Religion and Society
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The Iona Blog
Opinions contained in The Iona Blog are not necessarily those of The Iona Institute. The Iona Blog is open to anyone who broadly shares the views of The Iona Institute. If you wish to post a comment on a relevant topic please email 200 – 400 words to info@ionainstitute.ie and it will be considered for inclusion in the blog.
Who needs fathers when TV will do instead?
~There was an excellent article in The Irish Independent magazine on Saturday that dealt with the trials and tribulations of conceiving children through the use of donor-sperm. There are more ethical problems attaching to this than you can shake a stick at and Breda O’Brien wrote a paper for us on some of those problems that we published last year. Read more...
How tax individualisation makes child benefit cut worse for stay-at-home mums
~The new Conservative government in the UK has landed itself in hot water over its plan to cut child benefit payments to what it describes as “higher earners”. And while the Government here is focused on cutting non-essential spending here, it might learn some useful lessons on what not to do from the approach taken by the Tories. Read more...
Benign Nobel tale of IVF not quite so noble
~The international media has been full of stories about the granting of the Nobel Prize to Dr Robert Edwards, one of the scientists behind the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). But there are a couple of dirty little secrets about IVF which all the happy media stories don't reveal. Read more...
Surveying levels of religious knowledge
~A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life generated a lot of headlines by showing that, although Americans are more religious than most people in the developed world, they also appear to be relatively ignorant about religion. Read more...
Regulating (or forbidding) conscientious objection
~The subject of our conference last Friday becomes more relevant with each passing day. A report is currently before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) calling on member-states of the Council to ‘regulate’ conscientious objection so as to ensure that women seeking procedures such as abortion are not denied their ‘right’ as a result of someone’s moral objection to same. Read more...
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire and the purpose of moral boundaries
~ITV aired a remake over the last three weeks of the (for its time) shocking 1976 TV series, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire. The character around whom all the action centres is Prue, the university-age daughter of Peter who is unhealthily obsessed with her. Read more...
The Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the aim of The Iona Institute
~One of the aims of The Iona Institute is to highlight, and to do what we can to counter the rise of aggressive secularism and the consequent and growing threat to freedom of religion and conscience. Just how relevant this work is, was highlighted by remarks made both by Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, during the Pope’s visit to Britain which ended yesterday. Read more...
The Irish Times poll on sex and society II
~Here are a few more thoughts on that sex, sin and society poll in The Irish Times. Yesterday the paper ran part two of the poll and one question asked respondents to rank in order of personal disapproval eleven types of behaviour that all the major religions regard as sinful. Read more...
The Irish Times poll on sex and society
~The Irish Times poll on sex and society Yesterday The Irish Times published the results of a poll that show we are becoming ever more liberal in our attitudes towards sex and relationships. The results, which aren’t a bit surprising, will be greeted with much self-adulation by liberals because they mean we are becoming more tolerant. Read more...
The first Irish study of children with LGBT parents
~Last week Marriage Equality, an organisation campaigning for same-sex marriage, published a report to considerable fanfare that deals with the experiences of children raised by same-sex couples. What was actually even more interesting than the report itself was who funded it and who turned up at the launch Read more...
Where men’s pay is falling behind women’s
~We hear a lot about the pay gap between men and women. This is allegedly the result of sexism against women although it is really the result of the different choices men and women make about their work and home balance. Women tend to choose home over work if forced and that will obviously affect their earnings. Read more...
The growing marriage and religion gap
~Dr Brad Wilcox of Virginia University, (he spoke at an Iona Institute event last year), and Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin have a thought provoking column in the Wall Street Journal. The column draws attention to the widening marriage and religion gap between the American working and middle classes and the hugely harmful effect of this on the working class. Read more...
The recession and marriage
~The latest unemployment figures confirm once again that two-thirds of the 450,000 people who are without a job in this country are men. The same phenomenon has been found in other countries. Basically, the recession has disproportionately hit construction and manufacturing, traditional male industries. This is why some commentators have called the recession a ‘mancession’. Read more...
Is race a relevant factor in adoption decisions?
~A story in the British press over the weekend relates how a couple were refused permission to adopt a black or Asian child because they are both white. The local authority in question objects to inter-racial adoption. The authority obviously believes that the race of a couple is a relevant factor in deciding which couples get to adopt what children. They obviously believe that it can have an adverse effect on a child’s life to be adopted out of his or her race. Read more...
Money scruples obscure real moral issue in AHR debate
~Box office figures from the US suggest that Jennifer Anistion's latest comedy, The Switch, which is about a forty-year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated has flopped, at least in its first week. Read more...
Britain’s failed teenage pregnancy strategy
~New numbers from the UK suggest that their teen pregnancy rate, already the highest in the EU, is on the rise again among under 16s after some years of remaining steady. This is despite the Labour Government spending 13 years and hundreds of millions of pounds in concerted effort to halve pregnancies among under-18s by this year. Read more...
Is Ireland really the most expensive for day-care?
~Is Ireland the most expensive place for child-care in the developed world? According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the answer is yes. Taking a two-income couple with two young children in day-care as its mark, it finds that we are indeed the most expensive country, that such a couple will pay a whopping 45 percent of their net income towards day-care. In Poland the equivalent figure is only 5 percent. Read more...
Judge Walker vs the voters
~Judge Vaughan Walker's ruling overturning Proposition 8, the referendum passed in California in 2008 preserving traditional marriage, has provoked a firestorm of controversy, and not just for the obvious reasons. Read more...
Divorce from the point of view of fathers
~The Daily Telegraph ran a feature on Tuesday written by Tim Lott, a divorced dad about how lonely and bereft fathers can be when they are forcibly separated from their children. Read more...
Aniston's unhelpful remarks on family
~Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing on National Review Online, takes a stance in this article against remarks made by Friends actress Jennifer Aniston (pictured). Read more...
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